The ongoing battle between the social gaming companies Zynga and Kixeye has taken a new twist as Kixeye have filed a retaliatory lawsuit against Zynga filing a cross-complaint with the Superior Court of California.

For those of you who don’t know the history of the dispute between the two companies, it all began when Zynga filed a legal complaint against former CityVille general manager Alan Patmore who left the company to join Kixeye in August.

Zynga claimed that Patmore had unlawfully taken 763 files from the company before he left including confidential game designs and took them with him to Kixeye. Then Zynga went even further naming Kixeye as a defendant in the lawsuit and stating that they were aware that Patmore had the files and wanted access to them. They wanted damages from Kixeye and attorney fees. Continue Reading

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The hacktivist group Anonymous has set their target on social game developers Zynga this week accusing them of mistreating their employees and taking actions that will “end the US game market as we know it.”

At the end of last week the news emerged that Zynga had shut down their Boston office, laying off all the employees there and getting rid of hundreds of workers from other branches in the U.S too. It was also claimed that these employees were given no warning and ordered to clear their desks within a few hours.
Anonymous is now threatening to take Zynga and Facebook down on November 5th in an operation dubbed “#OP MaZynga.” They claim to have uncovered secret Zynga documents that seem to suggest that the company will be making yet more redundancies in the U.S. and transferring their workforce to more ‘financially convenient’ countries. Continue Reading

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Zynga CEO Mark Pincus has confirmed the reports that the social game developers have closed down their Boston office and laid off two thirds of the employees at the Austin office – with drastic cuts being made to Bingo and The Ville teams.

Neither the Bingo or TheVille games have been doing especially well of late according to information from AppData. TheVille has suffered the most, hemorrhaging nearly 10 million active users in the last month. Zynga Bingo has seen a less dramatic decrease, dropping from 5.8 million monthly users to 5.4million in the last 30 days.

The news was picked up after Justin Maxwell, a former Apple, Sony, Mint and Smule employee tweeted about it. Maxwell heard about it from friends who were actually made redundant by Zynga in these sweeping cuts, who he claimed were given just 2 hours to clear their desks. Apparently it all went on while the entire tech community was glued to the Apple Keynote speech that took place in San Jose at 10am PDT, no doubt an intentional move by the company hoping to minimize the shockwaves. Continue Reading

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Zynga has agreed to pay $200m for the maker of Draw Something, a Pictionary-like play-by-email-esque game which already been downloaded more than 35 million times in six weeks. It also boasts 13.3m active users in the most recent 24-hour period and top the list of games being played by people who connect through Facebook.

The purchase of New York-based company OMGPOP on Wednesday echoes Zynga’s $53m purchase in late 2010 of the company behind Words with Friends, which coincidentally, a number two game on the AppData charts.Continue Reading